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Comment by huytersd | Hacker News Reader

I wish they served beer and wine there.

I wish they sold BOOKS. My local B&N (15 miles north of Philly) has converted 25% of shelf space to toys. The tradeoff: just 2 shelves of computer-related books, now titled "Technology", most of which are about using Windows or Office.

Does this trend reflect the dumbing down of B&N or its customers?

It probably reflects the reality of trying to sell computer books in 2023, and what kind of people are willing to buy those books in a mainstream bookstore. Computer books lose relevancy quickly as their information becomes out-of-date, and people who buy them are more likely to look online for the lowest price.

Good point. I mostly buy fiction or self improvement/productivity books. Technology can work if it’s not application specific like a book design patterns for software.

if it’s about how to use MS Word, a google search or youtube video will probably tell me what I need to know.

I still miss the Computer Literacy stores in Silicon Valley but that era is long gone.

Books on the latest office version lose relevancy quickly. However there.are timeless books on things like algorithms as well.

Booksellers rarely understand which those are though.

I’ve considered volunteering my services to small used bookstores to help them decide which computer books to buy. Seems like a win-win: I’d get first shot at anything interesting that arrives, and they’d have a way to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I thought the same recently, but tech changes so quickly that I don't think, except for a place known to be densely tech oriented, have a market for books that go out of date in 1-2 years.

It reflects the reality of the internet existing and it being the year 2023 not 2003 I think?

Why on earth would a book store carry any relevant computer technical books nowadays?

>Why on earth would a book store carry any relevant computer technical books nowadays?

Because books can explain concepts better than any other medium. Books aren't great for reference/howto because that info goes out of date quickly. E.g. I'm not going to buy a book about browser APIs, I'll use MDN. But I will buy a book about SPA design or HCI. I'll certainly buy a book about a topic like performance analysis or comparing different approaches to ORMs or practical cryptography. The specific libraries will go out of date quickly, but the concepts will be useful for a very long time (and even the specifics will be at least somewhat correct for longer than you'd expect).

Like everyone else, technical people have had their attention span removed, segmented, and captured by capital such that "sitting down and reading a book (about a technical subject)" is met with horror. There is hope: the brain is quite plastic and even if you've let yours soak in the sensation stew of your phone 8 hours a day for years now, you can regain this important function soon enough. A well-written tech book is such a pleasure! A long narrative, coherent and filled with nuance...it's an important style of communication and I don't think we want to lose it.

I didn't say technical books were irrelevant, I asked why a book store would carry them. The people most interested in computer related technical books are those who most heavily use the internet and therefore are most likely to be the ones who buy via amazon or directly from the author.

That's before we consider that such technical books are going to be a niche within a niche, in other words, not something to put in a mainstream book store.

Historically you might have even needed to find out specialist bookstores for such books or had them ordered specially via the bookstore.

>I didn't say technical books were irrelevant, I asked why a book store would carry them.

Oh, sorry. It's because book stores want to carry books that are relevant. There is a catch-22 in what you say, because you're right that we've gotten used to buying books online (alibris, not amazon please) which makes bookstores carry them less, which makes us less likely to buy them in bookstores... The spiral downward is real; the opposite, a spiral upward, can also be real with a little effort. Bookstores are filled with books about niche interests, why not ours?

Makes perfect sense to me. I used to have a lot of computer books on my shelves. They're all gone. Internet access is just a given these days, so there's very little reason to have reference documentation in print.

And for more complex matters, a good youtube video is superior. Modern software can have extremely complex interfaces. It's much easier to follow along with a Blender video than to gain the same knowledge from a book.

I'm finding myself slipping back to books again now. It's very hard to sift the wheat from the chaff with online stuff.

Agree —- as someone who previously only owned software books for coursework in the early ‘10s, I’ve built up a growing collection over the past 3 years. The quality of book content is generally much higher than blog posts and SO answers, and I’ve never been one for eBooks / PDFs.

Plus, it makes my home office feel more in tune with my profession. I like to see the books on the shelf and leaf through them while waiting for my CI to build.

....or does it reflect how we consume our information about technology these days? How quickly are tech-books out of date?

VLSI design books written in the 1990s/2000s are still relevant today. This is one of the areas which are arguably at the forefront of knowledge advancement, and yet the tools of the trade, concepts, languages are still the same.

Okay, but who actually walks into a physical book shop and expects to find a highly technical book relevant to less than 0.01% of the population? Unless it's attached to the CS/EE campus of an university.

How many Verilog books an average bookstore branch is going to push monthly you think?

At my B&N they replaced the music and movies section with the larger toys section and added more writing products. They didn’t take away any space for books. Having the toy section is actually nice since the demise of Toys R Us.

I used to buy computer books there, but I mostly buy Manning ebooks now.

Mentioned in the article; this was their previous hail-mary strategy, which the new guy is now dismantling.

Mine still has an iOS 5 book on those two shelves. 11 years old.

The location in my town serves food and beer/wine. At one point they had at least five B&N Kitchen locations, but it looks like they're down to two:

https://www.barnesandnoblekitchen.com/locations/

To me, it makes sense to get rid of the full kitchen but keep the coffee, beer, and wine.

The Waterstones bookshop on Tottenham Court Road, London, has a coffee shop and bar in the basement. It's very comfortable and pleasant, although I haven't been in for about five years now.

Sadly, the stock of specialised books is much reduced. The mathematics section used to have its own room, ruled with a rod of iron by a fearsome Russian (?) lady. Now reduced to a couple of shelves. Coffee you can get anywhere ...

I'm wondering how Foyles competes now. It used to be a near-mythical warren of floor to ceiling piles of obscure technical and academic books. At some point in the mid 00s it moved to a cleaner slightly newer building and became tidier and more antiseptic.

The old building has been replaced by a bizarre wrinkly pink-ish box.

I haven't been for years. I'm curious if it's gone more mainstream.

Definitely more mainstream, corporate, antiseptic. Still one of the best (if not the best) big bookshops in London, still worth a visit (but do have a schlepp down to Goldsboro and Any Amount further down the road).

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